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The Small Free Unit and Larger Concentrated Unity 361literary and artistic culture. The equally vivid political, juridicaland military life of the single city of Rome created for Europeits types of political activity, military discipline and science, jurisprudenceof law and equity and even its ideals of empire andcolonisation. And in India it was that early vivacity of spirituallife of which we catch glimpses in the Vedic, Upanishadic andBuddhistic literature, which created the religions, philosophies,spiritual disciplines that have since by direct or indirect influencespread something of their spirit and knowledge over Asia andEurope. And everywhere the root of this free, generalised andwidely pulsating vital and dynamic force, which the modernworld is only now in some sort recovering, was amid all differencesthe same; it was the complete participation not of alimited class, but of the individual generally in the many-sidedlife of the community, the sense each had of being full of theenergy of all and of a certain freedom to grow, to be himself,to achieve, to think, to create in the undammed flood of thatuniversal energy. It is this condition, this relation between theindividual and the aggregate which modern life has tried to someextent to restore in a cumbrous, clumsy and imperfect fashionbut with much vaster forces of life and thought at its disposalthan early humanity could command.It is possible that, if the old city states and clan-nationscould have endured and modified themselves so as to createlarger free aggregates without losing their own life in the newmass, many problems might have been solved with a greatersimplicity, direct vision and truth to Nature which we have nowto settle in a very complex and cumbrous fashion and under perilof enormous dangers and wide-spread convulsions. But that wasnot to be. That early life had vital defects which it could not cure.In the case of the Mediterranean nations, two most importantexceptions have to be made to the general participation of allindividuals in the full civic and cultural life of the community;for that participation was denied to the slave and hardly grantedat all in the narrow life conceded to the woman. In India theinstitution of slavery was practically absent and the woman hadat first a freer and more dignified position than in Greece and